Heleen Blanken

Heleen Blanken

The films, compositions and installations of Amsterdam based artist Heleen Blanken have a captivating sense of imagination that stops you in your tracks. Going from a Fine Arts degree at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, to becoming a resident artist at club Trouw Amsterdam and performing spectacular visual shows internationally, in collaboration with the likes of Jeff Mills and Voices From The Lake, Heleen Blanken’s various immersive visual art projects have firmly established her name both in electronic music and in the visual arts scene.

Drawing much inspiration from nature and science, Heleen ingenuously merges the realms of sound and vision in a way that speaks, in a subtle way, very directly to the public. With deep reverence for our natural environment she daringly balances aesthetics and ideas. She designs every bit of film and imagery from scratch, and shapes them into entirely novel constellations that defy traditional artistic dichotomies like the organic vs. artificial, or analogue vs. digital. Her carefully layered, rhythmic compositions play with our sensory experience of time and spatiality, while at the same time they invite us to engage with the more ideological sides of her work.

Heleen Blanken has showcased her work in clubs, festivals, theatres and visual arts institutions all over the world. Her most recent projects include a three year long residency as visual designer for Ben Klock’s Klockworks label worldtour, Terrene (2016) a sculptural installation conceived with producer Peter Van Hoesen that investigates the myriad interactions between geological structures, the earth’s atmosphere and our perceptions thereof, and Ousia (2016) a dramatic, compelling installation at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam that breathes life into industrial debris and artefacts.

Heleen recently returned to the Sandberg Institute (Rietveld’s MA programme) to join the Radicale Verbeelding (Radical Imagination) masterclasses in anticipation of some very exciting new projects and collaborations.